


Like Real People Do

by FictionIsSocialInquiry



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Love, Pining, building something slowly... in 700 words, but like... big love fluff, i guess its fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29393997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionIsSocialInquiry/pseuds/FictionIsSocialInquiry
Summary: He lays back against her thigh, conflicted vulnerability in his eyes. ‘I want more,’ he admits and her heart— which has never quite recovered from the acrobatics he puts it through— trembles. ‘If this… I don’t know what you want here, but I want more.’
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 242





	Like Real People Do

**Author's Note:**

> I saw some incredibly soft fan art and had some Feelings. So now this ficlet exists. Big thanks to my lovely goldilocks23 who beta'd for me and my tired brain <3

There is no war anymore and yet there are battlefields here of another kind.

She watches him across the ballroom. She shouldn’t be. He is occupied by Lady Okra of Ba Sing Se and the daughters of the Marquess’s of Shu Jing _and_ Ember Island. She shouldn’t be following the exchanges— eyes lingering on the smiles coerced from the Firelord— but she is.

Suki, beside her, engages the Prince of Omashu in discussion on colonies and reparations and securing the new Firelord’s line.

Katara is fifteen.

She is not ready to secure anyone’s line.

That she spends her nights walking gardens with the young Firelord and kissing under midnight-blooming flowers is not marriage and heirs. Only smiles and blushes that are becoming harder and harder to ignore during the day.

She has work here. She’s an elected member of the Fire Nation’s intermediary restoration council.

But the new Firelord is an addictive distraction.

—

Twelves moons have waxed and waned since the war ended.

She has just accepted her new position, completed the first part of her training in the South. The moon is full and low in the sky tonight, as though too heavy to hang above the clouds— Fire Nation moons have always felt warmer, weightier somehow.

She doesn’t hear him slip into the Water Tribe apartments.

She is a woman now by the customs of her people.

She doesn’t hear him until he speaks.

‘Katara.’

Her heartbeat drops into her stomach, flutters beside her breathless nerves.

There is no Lady Okra of Ba Sing Se or any Marquess’s daughter. The Firelord has foiled his minister’s every attempt at securing him an heir.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he mutters, and the crack in his voice splits her dislodged heart down the middle.

She’s missed him, too, so much it hurts.

—

She waits for it to subside.

They tell one another _I love you_ but it is in the dark, at night, alone in their bed chambers. She waits for it to lessen, for her water to dampen him or his fire to burn her out but this thing between them? This softness? It only takes root and _thrives_.

The sun has risen and set so many times on this secret thing between them that his hair hangs long and silken and she is inches taller and years wiser to the tricks of her trade. She dreams in policy and they spend long hours at night whispering their plans to one another.

There is no war anymore, but life is still full of plottings and careful manoeuvres. They do not have the luxury of simplicity; of kissing over breakfast or holding hands in public like real people do.

He never talks about it, but she knows the kind of schemes he navigates to keep this moonlit softness, to outrun the inevitable just a while longer. She’s frightened to ask.

How much time do they have left?

—

‘I’m having a decommissioned warship refurbished for you,’ he blurts out one night. He’s staring determinedly at the ceiling, his head cushioned on her thigh, the summer sheets a ripple around his waist.

‘You’re… what?’

His expression is all hard lines and quiet frustration. She can read him so well, well enough to translate the lingering stares he’s been giving her when he thinks she’s not watching. Well enough to guess at his mood now. ‘If you… if you wanted to move here, it means you could visit the South whenever you wanted.’

She unthreads her fingers from his hair. ‘Are you asking?’

Katara is twenty three.

She has _thoughts_ , now, when she drinks her contraceptive tea— thoughts of golden-eyed waterbenders and touching the Firelord in daylight.

Recently, securing lines does not feel like a burden.

‘It’s your choice. It has to be your choice.’ He leans up on one elbow and fishes a twin of his crown from his bedside table. He palms it, runs his thumb carefully up the side. ‘You know what I want.’

She does.

He’s never spoken about it, but the suitors stopped arriving years ago. The pleading of his ministers met deaf ears from a Firelord who usually considers every viewpoint fairly.

He lies back against her thigh, conflicted vulnerability in his eyes. ‘I want more,’ he admits and her heart— which has never quite recovered from the acrobatics he puts it through— trembles. ‘If this… I don’t know what you want here, but I want more.’

He’s never asked this of her. At first, she mistook it for ambivalence, but Katara is an excellent student; it’s been years since she mastered reading the Firelord. She slides her thigh up, pushing him closer, curling forward until she cradles his head— until the quiet hope in his eyes is nose-to-nose with her.

‘I want more,’ she admits and kisses him curiously, wondrously, kisses him through this delicate tension he’s spun with a question and a crown.

He wraps his arm around her shoulder, pulling her down. She wonders if she’ll ever adjust to this once daylight illuminates them, lights her up on his arm for the whole world to see. She kisses the Firelord and the dreams of sunshine kisses and golden-eyed children feel solid, substantial. 

“More” begins in the morning, with conversations and negotiations and formalities. For now, they allow themselves a different kind of more.


End file.
